ARCADE KID (10)
By:
December 6, 2023
We are pleased to present ARCADE KID, a ’90s “drivethru” written, illustrated, and soundtracked by HILOBROW friend Nikhil Singh. Our readers are urged to check out Nikhil’s dystopian psychedelic-noir novel Club Ded (Luna Press, 2020).
1994. That time Trent Reznor turned Industrial into radio pop. Another vile, industry Trojan Horse let slip — ‘Gangster Rap’. Cry Havoc! A blatant commercialization of the underground East Coast sound, with its colourful, maniacal characters like the one-eyed Bushwick Bill. ‘Gangster Rap’ — an industry genre. Designed to cash in on voices of dissent by promoting racial and social stereotypes. A corporate cash-play. Drowning out grass-roots artists with a factory-line of dressy, made-to-order thugs. All the original edge-crazies under fire by corporate appropriation. Blowfly, still tripping on aliens and computer overlords. Cool Keith and his hall of personality-mirrors. Wesley Willis’s schizophrenic happy-go-lucky pop inversions. My 1994 ticked by under the media onslaught. Larry King annotating OJ’s high-speed chase. David Lynch watching it, getting inspired for Lost Highway (by way of Mary Lambert’s remake of Dragstrip Girl, for the television series Rebel Highway — starring his then wife, Isabella Rosellini). I was working several novels at once. Recording solo voice and piano tracks. Lead singer in a proto-Industrial band with Raymond Ross and Just Music’s Matthew Fink. Making cut-up VHS splice movies shot on handy-cam. Drawing with a dip pen. Laundry marker tattoos on fairy girls at outdoor festivals. Arcades mutated into clubbing. A similar atmosphere of sociable chaos. Elevated. Volume all the way up. Chiefly goth. Though I travelled everywhere. Mostly in short skirts, black lipstick and eyeliner. I liked to climbs things. Walls. Palm trees. Elevator shafts. In 1994, almost everyone seemed a little goth. Clubs didn’t yet have the sickening exclusivity that emerged toward the end of the decade. The cultural fascism inherent in a dress-code. This was an era rich in bleed-through. Cross-pollination. A bewildering array of ‘gothic-ness’. Industrial rarities, mostly Italian or German. Experimental tape recordings from the 80’s. Obscure French and Belgian Coldwave singles. Melancholic Russian and Yugoslav synth bands. Dusty, cowboy Nephilim goths in rust colours and trench-coats. Filthy, half-naked punks, punctuated by safety pins — always having sex in public. Cute, bathrobe wearing Daisy Chainsaw goths clutching teddy-bears, grinning psychotically from the shadows. Standard Bauhaus fodder. Euro-pop hipsters. Hyper-dolled pre-Gaiman Death girls (whose make-up I sometimes shot off with a water pistol, from the edge of the dancefloor). Horror movie clown goths. Future-goths. Fringe-flicking half-indie goths. B-boy goths. Fake hipster ‘gummi-goths’. The future was dark. Everybody had a smart drink and a cyber jack coming. More a vicious post-modern attack than remixology. Pop cuts, blowtorched to fuzz. Unearthed melodies. Like bones from irradiated corpses. Video to match. Slashed, bleached, noise-heavy reconstructions. Overlaid with text sometimes. Glitches. Static, defaced stills. Jarring frame-rates. Surreal repetitions. The overall atmosphere was abstract. Mic noise, room noise, but neatly intercut. Strangely neat carnage. Introspective, asymmetrical melodies. Interspersed with jarring noise. Like a grey-fade bird, flashing vivid under-plumage. Fried, saturated moments. Game samples on overdrive. Tactical synth presence. Way beyond screwed. Industrial flavours. A taste of Cazazza. That whole Throbbing Gristle legacy that seemed to underlie most of the scene. Some guitar textures. Sampled fuzz. Funk feels.
More NIKHIL SINGH at HILOBROW: DREAMING MEDIA (Q&A) | JOURNEY TO IXTLAN | HASHTAG FASHION POLICE PROBLEMS | ILLUMINATE OR DISSIPATE? | HATE ISLAND. ALSO: HADRON AGE SF (2004–2023) | ORIGINAL FICTION at HILOBROW.